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Agent 110

"It's hard to say what will happen after the war," Dulles cautioned. "It's got to be won first."¹² That night he sent several of the more sensational cables to OSS/Washington with the designation "eyes only" for Donovan.

It is suggested that Switzerland is an ideal location for plants, tendentious intelligence, and peace feelers but no details are given. As our duty requires we have passed on the above information. However, we restate our satisfaction that you are the one through whom our Swiss reports come and we believe in your ability to distinguish good intelligence from bad with utmost confidence.¹³

Dulles and Kolbe met again the next morning, and Dulles gave him the alias "George Wood." For cover purposes, he arranged for a young Swiss girl named Emmy to pose as Kolbe's girlfriend. If Dulles needed to see Kolbe, he would have Emmy send a postcard that read something like: "Missing you. Wish you were here." If he needed information on a particular subject, there was a code system: for example, Emmy would request information on Japanese military matters by asking Kolbe to buy some more "Japanese toys and trinkets," and the next batch of documents would include up-to-date telegrams from the German Legation in Tokyo. Dulles also gave Kolbe a special OSS camera so he could photograph documents and send the rolls of microfilm in an envelope addressed to Emmy.

When the first of the "George Wood" cables arrived in August 1943, there had been plenty of skeptics. Donovan ordered a survey of the material, and he then sent a large sample to British Intelligence (SIS), whose deputy chief, Sir Claude Dansey, dismissed the source as "obviously a plant" and said, "Dulles had fallen for it like a ton of bricks."¹⁴ Kim Philby, head of the Iberian section of SIS and later revealed to have been a Soviet spy since the mid-1930s, also dismissed the cables. Of course, this was perfectly consistent with the Soviets' postwar plans: they did not want "good" Germans to overthrow Hitler and surrender before Soviet troops were on the scene. To investigate the material once and for all, Donovan set up a special panel.

Kolbe traveled to Switzerland as often as possible in late 1943 and early 1944, using the double envelope and other tricks to smuggle classified documents. By the spring of 1944, he had provided over 1,200 documents-none of them more than two weeks old. Among other things, Dulles learned that a secret radio transmitter in the German Embassy in Dublin was directing submarine raids on Allied shipping, that President Franco of Spain was about to smuggle large amounts of badly needed tungsten to German war plants, and that the valet to the British Ambassador in Ankara was a Nazi spy.

Vindication

Over the next few months, OSS/Bern and OSS/Washington exchanged a series of cables on the new source. Finally, on 29 December 1943, Dulles sent the following message to Donovan: "I now firmly believe in the good faith of Wood, and I am ready to stake my reputation on the fact that these documents are genuine."¹⁵ On 10 January 1944, Donovan passed 14 examples of the "George Wood" reporting to Roosevelt with the comment that it represented the first major penetration into the German Government. Dulles had persuaded Donovan, and that was all that mattered.

Skepticism at Home

The only problem with the "George Wood" cables was that few people in Washington or London were taking them seriously. Dulles had acquired a reputation for sending information that contradicted what was being learned from ULTRA, the special codebreaking program, which had gone into effect in late 1942. On 29 April 1943, Donovan had warned him:

For Dulles, vindication came later in the war when the British concluded their survey of the "George Wood" cables and pronounced them genuine. SIS went so far as to call their source the prize catch of World War II. Kolbe would provide over 1,600 documents, most of them cables from German military

It has been requested of us to inform you that: "All news from Bern these days is being discounted 100 percent by the War Department."

Posted: May 08, 2007 08:53 AM

Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:53 AM

Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:53 AM